


Dream of drowning, find you there

by jessikast



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Although I guess the epilogue would still fit, Canon Divergence, Dreams, Drowning, Fix-It, Gen, Immortal Husbands Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Immortal Wives, Minor Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, Minor Joe/Nicky, Post-Movie, is that what we're calling it?, psychic link
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-21
Updated: 2020-07-21
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:14:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25422967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jessikast/pseuds/jessikast
Summary: Nile still dreams of Quynh.This is how they find her.
Comments: 27
Kudos: 433





	Dream of drowning, find you there

**Author's Note:**

> This is my shameless fix-it fic. I KNOW that Quynh must be full of insane rage and is probably going to be the antagonist for the (please!) sequel. But - I just really want them to find her. Team feels and healing hugs all the way, guys!

It’s Joe who first notices that Nile always turns to face the same direction when she wakes gasping from a nightmare of drowning – Joe, whose religious observations are long since lapsed, but who still can’t help a sub-conscious calculation of the direction of qibla, where he would turn to pray. He doesn’t say anything to Nile at first, but even through the shock of adrenalin that wakes her, makes her pant and hold a chest that aches, she starts to notice the way he quickly scribbles in his notebook when she wakes.

After a few months, he has enough data and shows her and Nicky the pattern – and brings out a compass. No matter where they are, which hemisphere or which side of the Atlantic, without realising it on waking Nile will always face the same way.

They don’t tell Andy at first, but it’s not easy to keep anything from her. Even distracted by coming to terms with her own mortality and the challenge of finding a balance in working with Copley, Andy is too old to let anything slip past her. So they explain, and she tightens her jaw and just nods.

“Didn’t Booker do the same thing?” Nile wonders, sitting at a kitchen table, head bowed forward over her clasped hands, like she’s praying.

Nicky shrugs. “It took us several years to find him. And by then, he was already drinking a lot. He had enough nightmares to deal with, I know he tried not to dwell on them.”

Andy’s voice from behind him: “I asked him. Once. If he still dreamt of her. He told me the dreams had faded.” She walks forward, standing next to Nile, her hip bumping Nile’s shoulder. “I don’t know, it might have been for the best.” She rests one cool hand on the back of Nile’s neck, and Nile takes a deep breath, the first since she woke this night. “It’s bad enough to have one drowning. Don’t you do it too.”

When they ask Copley for help, for old shipping records and data ruthlessly hacked from salvage operations, he’s the one who suggests meditation. Nile looks at him askance. Copley is, generally, a grounded kind of guy and she wouldn’t have picked him for the meditation sort. He gives a half-smile, shrugs. “My wife,” he says, with that raw pause that he still always has when he brings her up. “She had bad dreams. A counsellor recommended meditation, lucid dreaming stuff. She said it helped her.”

It takes Nile a couple of weeks to figure out the trick of it. She meditates before she goes to sleep, taking fifteen or twenty minutes to calm and empty her mind, drifting into slumber in that state. Then, if she can when she wakes, she clings to that feeling, letting the physical pain of drowning wash away and holding onto that weird surety of _where_ it’s from.

The directions Joe is noting down become consistently more precise.

Nile hadn’t reckoned on the two-way nature of the dreams. The first time Quynh’s mind grabbed her own it was only for a second. Nile realised it had been an image of Andy’s face that had been caught, held and examined. She felt a surge of longing, of love-anguish-love before it was gone.

The next night, she filled her mind with Andy’s face as she meditated, and her dream had words. _Andromache? You promised_. _I’m here, you promised, so long._

Nile tells them about it, but leaves out the despair she felt.

At first the fleeting contact is broken, unfocussed, still largely the _something furious_ Nile had first felt. But as they grow physically closer, as Nile tries to project as hard as she can _we are coming for you we are coming we are looking and we will find you_ , there are glimmers of sentience, of purpose. Of desperate hope.

Nile is optimistic, but the first time she really believes it’s working is when she wakes just before dawn one day, as they’re getting closer to the coast. The image that had been shoved at her – and she’s sure it was on purpose – was of light filtering through water – dark and cold at the bottom in the seconds of life between drownings, but with enough focus on the scene that Nile can tell the angle of light is sharp, pale and brightening. It’s dawn; whatever Quynh can see she’s not so deep that she can’t see light at the top of the water. And – crucially – Nile realises that the deep thrum that’s still echoing in her ears is the sound of an engine, the muffled sound that carries from huge ships.

She calls Copley immediately, even though it’s barely 5am. “Shipping routes,” she tells him. “Logs, modern ones. Can you trace the ships, big ones, that were off the coast at dawn this morning?”

He’s bleary, still mostly asleep, but positive. The other immortals wake as she’s talking to Copley, and she sees them realise what she’s asking for. Their search, already tense, rackets up a notch. Andy goes and sits in the car, fingers drumming the steering wheel, while the others pack and pile in after her, belongings thrown into the boot to be sorted out later. Andy doesn’t speak, just drives, a little too fast, to the port.

Copley can, indeed, find the locations of ships. There are hundreds – given how far sound carries under water, the scope is huge. But two more nights in a row Nile has similar dreams – one more at dawn, another with a full moon directly overhead, all with the thumping thrum of engines. It’s enough to narrow it down, to a search area smaller than they’ve had before.

They hire a boat and buy small but powerful underwater speakers. Joe connects them to something that makes a sound like a siren – higher pitched and unmistakably different than the engines, nothing that could occur naturally under water. Nile is so keyed up she can hardly meditate, let alone sleep, but it doesn’t matter. The sense of urgency is so close that as they start to do sweeps back and forward across the nautical miles, she barely has to close her eyes and think of Quynh before the sepia-toned images are on her. She doesn’t know if Quynh understands what they’re doing, but she’s dragged down, mind entangled with one that is focussed on _this is what I see are you near Andromache let me see her? Oh please this is what I see_

Nile drowns and wakes and clenches her hands into fists so hard that her nails bite into her palms, eyes closed as she coughs and drowns and wakes and chokes and hears a sound-

Her gasp alerts the others. The boat slows, and they narrow it down, the world’s worst game of “hot or cold” as the she focuses on the moments of awareness between Quynh’s deaths to judge if the siren is louder or quieter than last time, circling around until the sound is overwhelming and she can’t tell if the vibration of the Iron Maiden around her is the beating of Quynh’s fists or vibrations of sound through the water.

Joe and Nicky are waiting, scuba gear on crowbar and underwater welder in hand. Andy just about jumps overboard after them, but the sound of Nile collapsing sideways on the desk of the ship, exhausted, distracts her, and even though she’s looking over her shoulder every few seconds, she’s able to help Nile sit up, _wake_ up properly, have some water.

Nicky and Joe had entered the water in late afternoon, and it’s dark before they actually get the Iron Maiden open. As Nile had thought, the water here wasn’t that deep – recreational scuba-diving deep, just impossible to have found in the vastness of the ocean. Nile, mentally exhausted by days of unfocussed focus has just dozed off, leaning against Andy, who is holding Nile’s hand so tightly she’s losing feeling in her fingers. Her mind is just edging into dreams when Andy’s dragging her upright, still half-asleep, as Joe and Nicky are heralded by a surge of bubbles, breaking white at the surface of the water.

Nicky throws the tools up onto the deck of the boat. Joe is holding Quynh in his arms, fins gently treading water until he can pass the unconscious woman up onto the deck, into Andy’s arms. Quynh is naked, clothes and ropes long since rotted away, near-emaciated, skin cadaverous white, hair long and knotted. Andy holds her as if she were the most precious, dearest thing in the world, and presses her face into Quynh’s neck as she rocks her gently back and forth. She’s saying something, but it’s not English, not any of the languages Nile has been learning, speaking softly and constantly. Nile realises she’s crying silently, and wipes the tears away. Joe and Nicky have stripped their wetsuits to the waist, and Nile’s suddenly folded in a cold, wet hug between them before Joe goes forward to start the engine and Nicky is helping Andy stand, balancing Quynh’s weight, guiding them to the pile of blankets they’d brought at the stern of the boat.

That night, Nile dreams. It’s not a nightmare. She’s dry and warm and somehow, indefinably, safe, a beloved voice speaking reassuring nothings in a steady stream that sounds nothing like the swish and clink of the bottom of the sea.

In the morning, Nile wakes and meets Quynh. She doesn’t dream of drowning again.


End file.
